Rome - Empire Without Limit | Episode 2 | Free Documentary History

[Music] once you've got an empire what do you do with it and what does it feel like to be part of it well clues can often be found in very surprising places i'm talking rubbish ancient roman rubbish i'm in the middle of a roman landfill site millions and millions of broken pots that once contained the fuel of the ancient city olive oil it's trash but it's very valuable trash because it's through the leftovers of the roman world the bits and pieces and the junk as much as the monuments from the treasures that we can see how the roman empire works what feeds it what connects it who are the winners and who are the losers the romans never set out to acquire an empire but their undistinguished little town came to control a territory that stretched from britain in the north to algeria in the south spain to israel the nile to the rhine [Music] how did it look to the romans what do they make of it all how do they visualize it we tend to joke when we say all roads lead to rome but actually they did what about the concord what difference did it make to them just olives olives and more damn olives [Music] there were great fortunes for some but an expense of the many this tombstone for me is a bit of a tear-jerker so just how did rome transform the landscape of our world [Music] for an extraordinary record of the scale and impact of the roman empire i've come to see what must be one of the most remarkable and surprising leftovers from the roman world so i'm gonna show you our freezer and it's not a piece of pottery or even an inscription i shut the door yes so it must be what greenland feels like yes what i'm here to see is ice recently drilled from the arctic ice sheets preserving layers and layers of buried history right back to roman times how far in greenland do you actually have to drill down to get to the roman bit i would say 4 500 meters deep in the ice sheets [Music] by analyzing this ice celia sapot and her team at utrecht university have discovered some striking evidence about rome's impact on the environment so here you can see piece of ice from greenland that we have already measured so in fact you see all these small air bubbles and each air bubbles represent the composition of our atmosphere in the past gosh there's roman history melting in your hands and what we do in fact is that we measure the greenhouse gases in those little bubbles especially methane that's our main interest and we had a big surprise that around year one we had a increased level this in this methane fingerprint showing that higher level of biomass burning so burning can be burning because of deforestation burning because of all kind of other processes and comparing our data with historical data this peak was related to population growth and and to the roman empire expansion the data revealed a sharp spike in the level of methane in the earth's atmosphere that wouldn't be seen again for over a thousand years this is really great for me because we know that the romans had all this extra increase in productivity and industry et cetera but you know actually to see it kind of trapped there forever in the eyes that's truly extraordinary and i kind of think we feel a bit differently about it perhaps but i think the romans would have been absolutely delighted to see their impact kind of preserved like this yes roman pollution captured in the greenland ice sheets is dramatic evidence of a burst of energy as rome transformed the world it conquered in southern france is another of the remaining traces of that transformation the vir dimitia the ancient road linking italy to spain because rome built its empire from the ground up connecting people and places in a way that had never been seen before for us roads almost stand for rome and actually roman roads still do lie underneath many of our own transport routes but it's easy to forget quite how revolutionary it was to go from a system of windy local dirt tracks to great paved highways striking out across the continent it wasn't that the speed you could go on them was that impressive still took even the fastest romans about a week to go what we could cover in a day but the idea that you could start out in rome get on a road stick on it and end up in spain or greece that was entirely new like sinews crossing the empire the romans built a network of roads over 80 000 kilometers long not only creating a new geography but introducing an entirely new roman way of thinking about the world this is a bit of disused signage from a roman road it's one of the series of milestones that were set every roman mile it's about one and a half kilometers along all the major routes most of the writing on it is actually the emperor's name and titles so you know who to thank for this lovely road underneath is a big number three that means we're three miles from the nearest staging point what's important about this is that you know exactly where you are for the first time you can place yourself in the world [Music] of course once you got off the beaten track people in the countryside may hardly have noticed the arrival of rome life would have gone on much as before but where there were roman roads things changed not necessarily for the better it wouldn't have been fun finding a brand new super highway going straight through your land and romans complained much as we do about the bad food and exorbitant prices of the ancient equivalent of service stations for some though these new roads were a cause for celebration [Music] these are copies of four really strange roman drinking goblets that quite recognizably in the shape of milestones but just that they've got lists and lists of names of places scratched into them it says around the top is that this is the route from guardians that's cadiz in spain to roman to rome and between each place it's giving you the number of roman miles that you have to travel and at the bottom it does a grand total of the whole length of the road which is over 1800 roman miles that would take you more than 40 days to travel now quite what they were for is actually a bit of a mystery i mean they might be very practical it might be a useful traveling cup uh plus your route inscribed on the outside of it but i think it's rather more likely that they're either souvenirs of the road or a sort of celebration of the length uh and the splendor of this great road similar idea that you could find romans drinking and look-alike milestones really shows how sort of internalized that sense of road culture have become which is exactly what i'm going to do saloon everybody the goblets also point to that other great marker of roman presence on the landscape towns the romans sponsored the greatest programme of urbanization in history and in western europe their cities still often underlie our own all over the empire towns needed infrastructure it's the old cliche about the romans that they built roads and bridges baths and drains and aqueducts like this one and they plowed an awful lot of cash into it this wasn't one of the longest or the most vital aqueducts in the roman world it channeled water just 15 kilometers from a mountain spring to the small spanish town of segovia but all the same it's hard not to feel impressed by the ingenuity of it and the sheer herzba that series of arches this is where even i get a bit gobsmacked by roman engineering and in a way that's the point it's one of the trademarks of the roman empire it's meant to be in your face and its message goes far beyond any practical purpose this can't just be about the water supply this is about roman power it's about the romans making an impact on the landscape it's about the romans making themselves permanent to put it another way do you want to bring a water supply to a small town do you really need all this extravagance aqueducts towns roads these are the classic stereotypes of the roman empire that what it did for us but more than just clever engineering projects the romans can imagine them all fitting together this is the only roman map of the empire we have or actually it's a copy of a 13th century copy of an ancient roman map [Music] why this is important is it gives us a glimpse of how the romans pictured their own empire some of that's pretty obvious you've got rome right in the middle and leading out from it you can see the roads there's some familiar names there's naples or neapolis and there's pompeo and that rather squashed island there that's sicily then you move further and further east uh past crete here but my favorite bit i think is the nile delta with the city of alexandria in its lighthouse here and then all the little rivers and tributaries in the delta there in some ways this looks like a very mad representation of the world it's all terribly squashed and it's not arranged north south but it's making more important points than that it's saying that rome is at the very center and what's important about the empire is its cities its towns and its roads we tend to joke we say all roads lead to rome but actually they did and they led away from rome too what the romans are telling us is that theirs is a joined up world [Music] it's a dramatic statement of roman power and control and a network of connectivity which joins up places never before joined up and in this new connected world the demands of the roman state and over a million consumers in rome itself could be met by producers many hundreds of kilometers away this is when the hills of southern spain became a giant olive farm and juicing enterprise [Music] this kind of monoculture just olives olives and more damn olives is one legacy of the roman empire it was then that southern spain first became the world's biggest producer of olive oil more than seven million liters of the stuff going to the city of rome alone every year it was an agricultural revolution anyone who'd lived through it would have seen the countryside round about them completely transformed the roman empire ran on olive oil it was used not only for cooking but lighting and even the ancient equivalent of soap you couldn't live without it olive grower francisco nunez de porado is still in the business is the whole economy of this area is it all based on olives yes olive trees with olive oil and the whole process represent in this area practically in between uh 70 of the income i mean some people like you are growing the olives yes but then and then you've got your pickers your specialist pickers but you've got presumably transporters um you've got middlemen you've got export agents everybody have to be especially in something [Music] it was much the same 2 000 years ago olive oil provided jobs in a highly profitable industry [Music] there were lots of people who made lots of money out of all this there were the growers and the pickers and the pressers and the packers and the transporters and the distributors don't forget there were the men who cashed in on us all by making the containers to put it in this was an oil economy [Music] shipping seven million litres of olive oil to rome and the wider empire each year required more than just trees and presses you needed an entire infrastructure whether in the form of warehouses bottling plants or ports one of the main transport hubs and distribution centers was a place the romans called hispalis and we call seville built into the fabric of the modern city unnoticed by most passes by today is an introduction to one of the roman officials whose job it was to make sure the precious oil reached its final destination this is a plaque put up in honor of a man called sextus julius possessor and it's ended up i'm afraid in an extremely inconvenient place really what it is is a description of possessor's whole career first of all he seems to be stationed in italy itself looking after the incoming supply of oil from both africa and spain but then he moves out to seville to a job which is described as procurator somebody who's in charge of the repambitis the riverbank of the river bitis an interesting case of how roman imperial administration works they never have very many people on the ground but they do get men into place in key areas and here we've got possessor i think as a safe pair of hands in seville making sure that nothing goes wrong with a supply of oil to roam from this end of course ultimately this was all for the benefit of rome but a more complex exchange was taking place too as olive oil flowed to rome money flowed into spain and there's evidence in the branding stamped into the oil jars themselves that this new wealth allowed some people access into the politics of rome itself this is a particularly tantalizing example because the stamp here reads very clearly port p a h that's port short for portus or probably river warehouse of someone called p a h and one thing we know is that the father of the emperor hadrian had those initials publius alias hadrianus so it's possible that this handle is telling us something about the source of the wealth of hadrian's family in the oil fields of spain and that it's telling us something about the commercial prophets that underpinned the power structure of the roman empire whether this was really where he'd made his money or not we know that hadrian the man on the roman throne for 20 years in the second century ad came from spain [Music] it's a reflection of just how joined up the empire had become and it's not surprising that hadrian bankrolled big building schemes here this is what's left of the town of italica where the emperor hadrian's family came from they weren't native spanish they were roman settlers from way back but they obviously thought of spain as their home hadrian plowed an awful lot of cash into his hometown tremendous showing off and to be honest all a bit out of proportion one of the biggest things he did was put up this huge amphitheater it would have accommodated 25 000 people now to put that in context the coliseum in rome accommodates about 50 000 or so so you've got a small town amphitheatre in roman spain with half the seating of the colosseum or to put it another way the population of little italica there's only something like 8 000 people in all to me that sounds a bit like a plutocratic benefactor giving little cambridge united a stadium half the size of wembley it is a little bit absurd we're now you know almost in the center of the arena this is where um the gladiators were to fought where the wild beast would have been slaughtered and right in the middle here you've got a sort of mini version of what you find in the coliseum itself the underground cellars where the gladiators and the animals would have waited to come up into the arena through trap doors in the floor it's very easy to get a rather overblown view of the brutality and the extravagance of gladiatorial and animal spectacle my guess is that you didn't see gladiators here very often you certainly didn't see very many exotic wild beasts um they did put on performances uh perhaps once a year on hadrian's birthday be my guess because the real point of this monument um was not actually entertainment for the locals or whatever sort the real point of this monument was to stamp the image of hadrian on his native city and what hadrian's italica really shows is something of the wider process by which rome remodeled the world in its own image in spain and elsewhere rome established itself for good not just in bricks and mortar but in institutions and laws which defined a specifically roman urban way of life these bronze tablets are just covered in columns and columns of writing and what that writing is is a constitution devised in rome for a roman town in spain i mean really it's a series of do's and don'ts for how to be a roman town abroad here's one about what the uh local officials called the e-dials should do now they're supposed every year to put on some nice plays in the city ludi sky nikki they have to pay no less than two thousand sester sees that twice as soldiers pay from their own money day sue our pecunia and they might just get a grant of one thousand substances from public funds if they do that so here we've got our generous local officials obliged to give us a theatrical display everything from seating arrangements at public events to the speaking time allotted to accusers and defendants at trial are outlined in this document and many have a familiar feel there's a great bit here which is about well in our terms it's about electoral expenses it says if you are standing for office if you're a candied artist what what you mustn't do is lavish expensive meals on people in order to encourage them to vote for you although it is allowed to give nine people a meal on one day but no more than that after that it's bribery that's the kind of level of micromanagement that the romans are trying to impose from roads to aqueducts civil servants to public performances in this kind of empire building cash was as important as armies in the ancient world if you needed cash you had to dig for it southern spain wasn't entirely olives there were plenty of riches in the form of silver to be unearthed here too x minor and local archaeologist saturnino aguero is taking me to see evidence of the roman operations here two thousand years ago this would have been an industrial landscape heaving with people one room when you actually visited reckoned that there were 40 000 men working for the mines in this area right so what we've got here is a place where the later mining has cut through to give a cross-section of the roman working and you can see some little square holes galleries or passageways and all over the rock you can i think see the pock marks where the roman miners have come in and they must have followed the ore seams and just taken the silver oil out and not bothered with the rest of it and it's the scale of the industrial processes that went on around here from the mining to the smelting that helps us understand those traces of methane we can still recover from the arctic ice sheets and the romans also recognized the problem of pollution they built the chimneys of the smelting plants very high to get rid of the noxious smoke it was a terribly exploitative system of resources of landscape and of people but there are also vast profits to be made too there are people who came here from italy in search of their fortune i mean in a way this was a bit like the gold rush or spain in a sort of way was rome's eldorado the first silver entrepreneurs took full advantage of a ruthless system in which profit was the sole consideration the organization of the spanish mines was a mixture of public enterprise and private enterprise the roman state owned most of them but didn't have the infrastructure to manage them so it sold the franchise to a range of private companies they called them publicani in our terms that's public service providers the dangers of that are obvious the state gets the basic minimum the only incentive for the private companies is to maximize their profits and the people who pay the price are the poor guys down there [Music] we've got to imagine hundreds of people underground all toiling to get the ore out and using pretty rudimentary tools this is a roman pick and you have to imagine that there's a a wooden handle here and you're picking at the surface of the rock like that this one is really heavy it's a rather clever dual use tool again it's got a a wooden handle going through there and you can either hammer at the rock or you can pick at the rock using the other end you'd have to be pretty strong to wield that effectively you'd have to be even stronger though to manage this crowbar and imagine you're coming and you're trying to pick out uh the seams of the oar and you're jabbing this into the rock to loosen it out with a sharp end this is obviously very dark dirty sweaty heavy labor [Music] and it's a reminder that beneath the surface of this sparkling new empire there were the silent underclasses keeping the wheels in motion this tombstone for me is a bit of a tearjerker we read about roman children being used in the minds as workers but here we actually seem to meet one he's a little boy called quintus archulis and he lived to be just four years old there he is he's got a little tunic on he's got a pick in one hand and a a basket in the other he's all set for work in the mine [Music] we don't actually know that that's where he died although many children must have what we do know is that it is as a minor that he's being remembered it was on small backs like these that the wealth of rome was built the silver he helped to mine minted into the currency of empire what most of this roman silva went into was coin things like this one roman estimates that each year in this area they got nine million of these that's an enormous impact on roman economy and society you can buy an awful lot of aqueducts and armies for nine million of these but what's amazing is that these coins came to be used all over the roman empire same denomination same designs jonathan williams is an expert in coins and deputy director of the british museum these are two very similar coins of the emperor hadrian distinctive face there and adriana's augustus that's right they're they are very very similar they're both roman silva dinari they're life bloody many ways of the roman currency system both of them have hadrian very similar they're the same value same amount of silver but they were found completely opposite ends of the earth um this one here was found in bletchley in southern england and this one was found in southern india it's britain of course inside the empire india outside the empire but loads of trading links absolutely does that mean that in a sense what rome has done is created a unified internal economy and coinage we've got monetary union really in the roman empire it's a single currency union uh when you talk about the gold and the silver coins particularly those are the ones as we see here that circulate throughout the roman empire and beyond everybody wants good roman gold and good roman silva but what you do have of course the other way in which the currency unifies the empire is that is that they've all got the head of the ruling man and it's his head being seen and used and noticed and commented upon from britain all the way through to india that's one of the key unifying factors about the roman empire together with all those statues and all those other things from its spanish minds rome maintained a constant flow of hard cash trickling down to contractors soldiers and traders across the roman world who could hardly have forgotten that all this wealth was tied to roman power in return rome became the focal point for all the empire had to offer drawing in taxes talent and the raw materials to build the imperial city we know today and one of the highlights still standing in all its glory is the pantheon for many romans walking past this building the most striking thing about it would have been the columns holding up the porch we tend not to pay them very much attention and if we do notice them we really don't know how to read them but they're actually one of the loudest boasts you could make about imperial power that's partly because they're monoliths they're carved out of a single piece of stone and just think how difficult that would be to do without them breaking or cracking but it's also the material itself they all come from quarries deep in a province 3 000 kilometers away from here egypt they've been loaded onto camels and donkeys dragged across the desert put onto ships in the nile taken to the mediterranean across the sea to stand here it's an extraordinary statement about the resources of empire and about the ability of the emperor hadrian who put this building up to control those resources the sense the stone is the message but even emperors couldn't control everything if you look hard at the building you'll see some awkward mismatches some odd misalignments to make it look as if the architects had been expecting columns a few meters taller and had to make some last minute adjustments when smaller ones arrived maybe the quarry just couldn't supply what was asked for or maybe some paul devil got the order wrong i wouldn't have liked to have been him for me the pantheon reflects how the empire changed rome just as much as rome changed the empire the capital was where stuff from all over the roman world was on display and on sale and at the center of this world was the mediterranean itself rome's internal sea it was much quicker and cheaper to bulk transport goods by water than by land and the mediterranean became a busy highway with cargo ships laden with things from grand granite columns to humble objects of daily life everywhere you went in the roman empire you'd have found people eating and drinking out of shiny red pots like this and you still find them stacked on museum shelves everywhere from hadrian's wall to north africa most of us that's me included just walked past them without a second glance but actually they're once left the most extraordinary case of roman mass production most of them are pretty plain but this one's got a more exciting decoration it's got pictures of the goddess diana having a bath and being spotted by the unfortunate action um who gets um attacked by his dogs as punishment for having seen the goddess with no clothes on it's quite hard to place exactly the sort of social level of this but i reckon it's um sort of very very middle market ordinary that's to say there'd be some people who would you know lust for just one of these bowls for their table there'd be others for whom this would be normal everyday crockery what's really important about all this is the simple fact that it just got everywhere when people dig us up in 2000 years time i guess they'll find loads and loads of fizzy drink cans and identical trainers across the world this is one of the first examples of globalization this is the roman brand through its roads and sea routes the roman brand spread throughout the empire this wasn't only the movement of goods but people too in the remote town of hierapolis in modern turkey we find the remarkable tomb of a man who seems to have made the most out of the opportunities of belonging to the new roman world this is a wonderful story of an exciting life on the high seas it's the tombstone of a man called flavius xuxus and he says that during his life he has sailed around the promontory of cape malia that's the very southern tip of greece between here in turkey and italy 72 times so what's he doing well hierapolis was the textile capital of this part of turkey and he can only have been going from here to italy to flog all the things they were making but what's interesting is what he chooses to put on his tombstone to sum up his life are those dangerous 72 journeys zeuxis must have been unusually successful or he wouldn't have bragged on his tomb but for someone like him the roman empire made the world simultaneously bigger and smaller bigger because of the expanded horizons and the distant markets now open to those who dared smaller because of the network of connectivity that enabled people and goods to get around the world more easily than ever before and a key part of that distribution were the ports nerve centers of roman trade and commerce one of the cities that flourished in the commercial world of the roman empire was ephesus which became a hub of input and export it had once been an old famous greek town going back centuries but it was transformed by the romans everything we now see here is the result of roman investment and the reason it was so important in the roman world is simple it's harbor imperial trade needs more than ships and merchants it needs well-functioning harbours the coastline around ephesus has long since changed and it's now a good way in land but in its heyday it was an important maritime gateway to the east and to rich pickings from as far away as india a reminder that the roman world was much bigger than the roman empire and ephesus would have felt like the whole cosmos had descended here people from everywhere speaking as many languages on the streets then as they do now a city the quarter of a million not just those that lived here but people coming and going and everyone busy busy busy the honest guys doing the hard day's work the cheats and the chances the go-getters and the bureaucrats and of course the money makers [Music] if you could afford a pad in the heart of ephesus then the chances are you profited from the constant flow of goods through the harbour these are up market houses for those who'd made it this is all amazing but it's also quite confusing there's a series of houses one above the other running up the hillside and they're partly interlocking so it's quite hard to tell where one house stops and the next one starts but what is clear is that there was a luxurious lifestyle going on here that some people in ephesus including the owners of these properties were doing very nicely thank you and it makes the point that the benefits of empire did not only flow to the imperial palace or to people in rome itself the homes of the ephesus elite were evidently pretty flashy no expense spared the fashions and trends of the city rome itself were imitated and reproduced here we've come into a kind of reception hall on a really palatial scale also it must all have been faced with marble right the way around and you can see the columns of marble on the side and there'll be panels in between and this is where somebody big entertained and displayed his wealth and power this is you know almost imperial scale um it must be pretty terrifying i think to be a guest at this house and i'm standing on a modern walkway um but you can see there must have been a great big door and there's big door fixings on either side you have to imagine that you would have had the door opened for you into this and there the big man would be ready to greet and possibly humiliate you the things that came from the temples of ephesus really live up to that classy roman style so too do the things from the terrorist houses one of the highlights are some exquisite if to my taste slightly militaristic ivory plaques showing the emperor on campaign but across the board the fines here really are top of the range the best that money could buy [Music] the question is where did the money come from like where did these guys who own these houses make their cash well trade obviously but to say trade makes it all sound a bit easy a bit comfortable it's one of the biggest commodities that came through the port of ephesus were human beings this town was a great center of the slave trade slaves flowed through the marketplace at ephesus like olive oil through seville the brutal truth was that many romans wouldn't have seen much of a distinction between the two as they saw it slaves were one of the products of empire many the victims of roman conquest or kidnapping or just foundlings if you wanted to buy a slave this is where you'd have come it's uncomfortable to grasp but the roman empire depended on slave labor and like every other ancient society the romans took slavery absolutely for granted but uncomfortable as it is if we want to understand rather than just deplore what went on here we have to try to get into the mindset of those who came to buy slaves what did they think they were doing my guess is they thought they were doing their shopping perhaps they were here after a gardener or a tutor for their child or maybe a hairdresser how are they going to be sure they weren't ripped off could they trade in last year's model and were they missing out on a special offer next week three for two that may seem a very callous way of putting it but it is the everyday reality of roman life slaves with the operating system of empire picking the olives quarrying the stone mining the silver and constructing the buildings they weren't just a perk for the rich quite ordinary craftsmen or small farmers could have afforded at least one but if you were the emperor it would have been thousands in fact it's at the emperor hadrian's villa just outside rome at tivoli that we can still get one of the clearest glimpses of the slaves world and the strict social hierarchy that underpinned the empire and this is where the slaves lived in hundreds of rooms how many were squashed into each one we just don't know but i don't imagine we should be thinking of individual bed sets some of those slaves servants or laborers and that's how we usually think about slavery but others would have been slave doctors accountants librarians musicians these were the people who were needed to power this estate a slave in the imperial household would have been in a lucky position compared to those working in the silver mines of southern spain the truth is we can't ever see it from their point of view because they haven't left any account which gives their side of the story so all we can do is imagine it this is where some slaves spent most of their working lives downstairs in a network of dark service tunnels beneath the grand airy quarters upstairs the people scurrying about down here were always meant to be invisible and they've remained pretty much invisible to us largely because they've left they traced behind them for me this underground world is a powerful symbol of one very nasty side of roman slavery and exploitation but before we feel too much moral superiority coming on might be worth reflecting how many invisible people there are beneath the surface of our world too this was the empire that hadrian kept hidden a labyrinth of tunnels separating the underclasses from the elite who inhabited the luxurious buildings above this was the empire that hadrian wanted to present to the world and it was built very deliberately to do just that even after almost 2 000 years of plunder and exposure to the elements it's a tivoli that we can still see better than anywhere hadrian's own vision of the empire in the biggest palace the roman world had ever seen if you came to visit the emperor hadrian in his great villa this is the approach you'd have taken and pretty impressive it was too big flight of stairs leading up to the monumental gates and on each side fountains playing a niche for statues and there probably been some burly guards in fact villa is a dreadful understatement even palace doesn't quite get it this imperial residence hadrian's country pad was the size of a town [Music] once you'd passed security and got your foot in the door the sheer scale of the place and the luxury would have been dazzling [Music] the baths the libraries the miniature theaters not that you'd have found hadrian here very much though more than any other roman ruler he was off for years touring his empire [Music] hadrian was always getting on the back of his horse going somewhere he was one of the greatest tourists of the roman world and half of his 20-year reign he spent on the road what he saw the monuments the temples the exotic highlights of the provinces he reproduced replicated and copied at tivoli the organization it would have taken to construct this place is almost unimaginable the builders themselves were only a part of it they were the people who sourced the material who placed the orders the architects the accountants and clerks and the dinner ladies who catered for the whole team i don't know if anybody's ever actually counted the total number of bricks in hadrian's villa but this really is building as a military operation those bricks now do make it all look a bit naked but remember it was originally covered with slabs of marble and works of art it's difficult to visualize it today but tivoli's interiors must have been amongst the most lavish in the roman world just a few broken pieces of marble have been unearthed giving us a snapshot what it might have looked like conservationist barbara caponera has the tricky task of trying to put the jigsaw back together sometimes you can get to see what covered those bare brick walls and this is an amazing image of a horse and a charioteer or his rider there's a horse's tail here and his leg there it's all made on the kind of same principle as a mosaic but with larger pieces so this is marble and the horseman's belt is is made out of blue glass and it was surrounded by a frame so it's kind of like a painting on the wall these marbles have been brought in all over the empire the horse's body is a rich yellow marble that we know comes from tunisia and one of these other fragments here is a great green marble that was from greece actually in the area around sparta what else have you got barbara ellis right so this is porphyry from egypt and it can go next to tunisia and this is another very bright red orange marble that comes from greece that goes next to sparta there it's almost as if we've got a map of the empire in marble on the walls and floors of the villa tivoli echoes rome's imperial possessions here statues representing rome with its mythical founders romulus and remus sit side by side with the god of the river nile representing egypt a visual reminder of how far and wide the emperor's domain stretched at the pantheon hadrian had displayed his power to control the resources of empire but here he went a step further trying to evoke on his own estate some of the most admired monuments and landscapes of the provinces including a slice of egypt this was perhaps the swankiest dining room in the whole of the roman world have to imagine the select few guests reclining here surrounded by water and picking up the delicacies from little boats floating in front of them but they weren't just eating five-star food in a lavish setting they were eating in a replica of one of the most famous monuments of the province of egypt because hadrian's project was not simply to create a luxurious lifestyle for himself it was to make the empire seem to converge here whether by sucking in its resources to this one place or by literally recreating the wonders of his world on his estate to tour the villa must have been like touring the empire this was the empire in microcosm in its ambition tivoli captures the essence of an empire that brought together places and people as never before along its roads in its busy cities and ports the inhabitants of the roman empire experience deep changes which still affect the world around us revolutions in engineering trade and agriculture these offered new opportunities riches for some and matching inequality for others it's always easier to find the winners than the losers the destitute the exploited the underdogs have left very little behind them the profiteers of ephesus the oil barons of spain and the entrepreneurs of the seas have left the traces of their success stories whether in the shape of broken bits of pottery or great grand columns but one thing's for sure winners and losers lived in a new world hadrian's villa activity offers an idealized and to be honest rather sanitized vision of the roman empire an ordered world with established hierarchies and everything in its place and here obviously under the command of one man the reality of course was more fluid more fractured and messy but this is the emperor's frozen vision of how the roman world was and should be in this new joined up world what did it really mean to be roman you saw the toga everywhere frequency how would you become one and what difference would it make to your life have a good bath it says i suppose it means flip-flops only [Music] you

Channel: Free Documentary - History

Views: 13,668

Rating: 4.8130841 out of 5

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, Rome, Roman Empire, Rome - Empire Without Limit, Imperium Romanum, Roman Empire Documentary, Rome Documentary, Ancient Rome, Classical Antiquity, Antiquity, Roman Republic, SPQR, Senatus Populusque Romanus, Western Roman Empire, Eastern Roman Empire, Colosseum, Caesar, Gaius Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Roma Caput Mundi

Id: cUB4Lcxeaps

Length: 59min 4sec (3544 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021